Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction (review)

A usefully snippy distinction between German and American theoretical dispositions opens Subjects and Selves, Gabriele Schwab’s own free adaption of her Entgrenzungen und Entgrenzungsmythen (1987). German by academic origin and Californian by current professional position, Schwab takes full advantage of her transnational perch in order to suggest that Americans “tend to adopt theories that have become mainstream” and that they provide instruments “for professional affiliation by creating specific critical and interpretive communities with their own modes of reception and circulation based on relatively stable premises and concepts.” In Germany, on the other hand, emphasis falls not on “mere transmission” but on the “development and reconstruction of theories” (xii), the building, rather than the application, of theory. To the extent that this is true, Schwab must be right to keep alive her German affirmation, and her resolutely constructive aim is key to what is strongest in her work.

The decisive move in Subjects and Selves is Schwab’s brave turn away from some lazy commonplaces in the current dictionary of received theoretical ideas, in particular the assumption that the critique of Cartesianism must imply the “death of the subject” (3). Her resolve is to swim against the sceptical tide by arguing that “structuration is as important as destructuration” (233), and in so doing to see the ongoing project of modernity not in terms of the crises of representation, meaning, and communication, but in positive terms that emphasize “the emergence of new forms over the disappearance of old ones” (5).

In this affirmative theory-building project the originating gesture is the recovery of the work of the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Winnicott is not alone in Schwab’s theoretical firmament, but he is the brightest star and the one she most successfully steers by. In a landmark essay of 1951 Winnicott looked at a range of infant activity—the sucking of thumbs, the caressing of blankets, the early play with soft animals and hard toys—grouping them loosely under the heading “transitional phenomena.” The leading feature of these experiences is that they inhabit a third realm between self and world, between primary creativity and the obligations of reality, a zone of illusion in which a nascent subjectivity can test its limits and can play its way toward equilibrium.

It is Schwab’s great merit to recognize the richly suggestive implications of Winnicott’s insight for a full-scale theory of culture. Literature, she proposes, inhabits a transitional cultural space, the successor to that infantile realm “whose function consists in continually reshaping the boundaries of language and subjectivity” (viii). Crucial to the proposal is the claim that cultures will vary widely in their respect for this activity: to the degree that the freedom of this transitional realm is acknowledged, literary experience will stimulate the reinvention of selfhood: it will create new desires in new expressive forms. This insight needs elaboration, but already it’s clear that Schwab has found a way to reinvigorate the enticing theoretical project, many times attempted, of a synthetic act between psychoanalysis and cultural history.

Subjects and Selves begins and ends with sustained discussion of this theoretical question, but its long middle offers readings of five masterworks— Moby Dick, The Waves, Finnegans Wake, The Unnameable, Gravity’s Rainbow —each positioned as an exemplary instance of the willfully transitional text, which radicalizes the struggle with psychic and linguistic boundaries. Schwab, who never loses her infectious critical energy and never emits a sigh of resignation, creates her own tidy historical narrative, according to which Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf prepare for the fuller culminations of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, with Pynchon appearing, as he does so often, as the unruly youngest child in a long family history, one who would clearly show his resemblance to his illustrious literary parents, if only he would stop his gaudy mugging.

If this interpretative half of the book is less satisfying, it is in large part because even in the terms of her own national distinction Schwab...